Kassandra by Christa Wolf

Kassandra tells the tale of the fall of Troy in a first-person flashback narrated by Cassandra herself. At the time of the telling, she has been in Greek captivity and is on her way to her execution. Cassandra was the daughter of Priam, the king of Troy, and his wife Hecube. Long before this novel’s starting point, the god Apollo had given Cassandra the gift of prophecy, but because she the refused to give him sexual favors he cursed her that her prophecies would never be believed. Cassandra’s lengthy monologue — the book is not divided into chapters, nor are there any line breaks between gaps in the story — begins some years before the Trojan War and continues past the city’s fall.

Wolf also expects her readers to know the court of Troy as well as Cassandra, who has grown up in it. She gives a little bit of context about who is who, and eventually I was able to piece together most of the relationships, but I am sure that as a person who has only read one Iliad one time I missed things. I added a layer of difficulty for myself by reading Kassandra in German, so I had to make the leap across the different transliterations of Greek names that have become traditional in German and English. (As I note below, there is an English translation of Kassandra, and Wolf’s use of language is not so spectacular that it presents more than the usual challenges of translation.)

Crucially for readers like me, who only know the Trojan War through the Iliad, Cassandra tells of expeditions from Troy to reclaim the king’s sister from captivity in Sparta, where she had been taken after another war. Women have considerable agency in the ancient world that Wolf depicts, but it is also, in the end, sharply limited, and women are routinely treated as objects, prizes for male conquest, or as a means to hurt other men. After two failed expeditions to retrieve their king’s sister, the Trojans’ willingness to support taking an equally valuable prize — Helen, the wife of Menelaus, king of Sparta — is more understandable. In Wolf’s telling, Paris breaks the customs of hospitality by insulting Menelaus when the latter is on a pilgrimage to Troy, and his subsequent abduction of Helen guarantees that the war will be unrelenting.

Troy’s fate is even worse than in many tellings of the story of the war because Wolf sides with Euripides and Herodotus in having Helen detained in Egypt and never reaching Troy at all. In Kassandra, when the ship ostensibly bearing Helen arrives it is late at night, and she is brought ashore covered and veiled. In the weeks that follow, she is said to be too fatigued to see anyone. When Cassandra finally confronts Priam about the lack of actual Helen, she is told that the war has too much momentum to be stopped, and that she should not be concerned with anything as petty as the supposed reason for the fighting. The war is being fought because the war is being fought.

Quite apart from retelling the Trojan War, Kassandra is operating on numerous other levels, though never simply or didactically. Wolf is above all famous as an East German writer. She was born in a city that is now in Poland, and her family fled somewhat westward at war’s end. She studied German literature in Jena, earning her degree the year that Stalin died. By then she was married to fellow author Gerhard Wolf, and immediately after she finished her studies she began to work in East Germany’s publishing world. She was a copyeditor and proofreader for publishers, and an editor for Neue Deutsche Literatur one of the GDR’s most important literary magazines. Within two years of graduation, she was a board member for the country’s Writers’ Union.

To write, to publish in East Germany, she had to reach some form of accommodation with the communist powers. Like Cassandra in her novel, Wolf herself was favored by people with power, but she also struggled with when to speak out and be true to her conscience. When she spoke, her words made no difference. It is possible to read into Cassandra’s gradual estrangement from her father and her slow progress in seeing how power really functions in Troy a story of Wolf’s own loss of faith in socialism. One of the threads of Troy’s changes during the war is the gradual accretion of power to Eumelos, who basically runs a security service in Troy. Read into the history of communism, this could parallel Stalin’s usurpation of Lenin, or it could match how in later years Beria amassed power as Stalin’s last head of the KGB. Wolf may have had parallels in the GDR in mind that I don’t know the history of East Germany well enough to spot; at any rate, it is a story of a cynical operator from state security gradually bending the state to his own wishes so that in the end the king himself is reluctant to cross his adviser. The ideals of the Trojan royal family fall to the plots of a climber who believes in nothing beyond power, even while mouthing the traditional pieties.

Cassandra is asked why she didn’t take opportunities to leave Troy — particularly with Aeneas, her true love — and she answers that it was impossible. Wolf, too, would have had opportunity to leave East Germany, particularly after she lost her leading positions in the Writers’ Union for supporting Wolf Biermann, an artist and musician the GDR expelled in 1976. After German reunification, Wolf said that she had the feeling that her East German needed her. I think that Cassandra in the novel and that Wolf in history could have left their homes, and their reluctance shows an attachment to things that are lost, or hollow, but whose loss they are unwilling to admit.

Wolf also shows an alternative to the corrupt court life: Anchises, a member of the royal family and the father of Aeneas, is the father figure of a group of people who live in the hills and canyons outside of Troy’s walls, though well away from the invading Greeks. They are poor, but also true to themselves and happy. They are healers, and people from the city come to them when wounded or ill. They sing often. Anchises is nearly blind, but carves wooden figures of animals, which he gives as tokens of esteem. Friends of Anchises, like dissidents in the communist system, are trustworthy people, living as far outside of the system as they can. Cassandra idealizes them, as I suspect that Wolf did their counterparts under socialism, but Cassandra never reckons with the fact that Anchises’ circle can only ever exist as a counterpoint.

For a book of roughly 150 pages, Kassandra grapples with a wide range of difficult questions, perhaps even more than Wolf fully realized. I can’t say that it’s a light or even particularly enjoyable read — I haven’t even mentioned her portrayal of Achilles as a beast. Cassandra nearly always refers to him as “Achilles the brute” or “Achilles the animal,” and from her point of view, he has more than earned those epithets. Cassandra recounts her mother’s coldness, her growing estrangement from her father as he becomes increasingly trapped in his role as wartime king, and her difficult relations with many of her numerous siblings. She gives a view into her own madness, and describes what trauma does to her sister Polyxena. And of course the story ends as she said on the first page that it would: with her end.

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Kassandra was translated into English in 1984 by Jan van Heuck. The English edition also contains four essays that she wrote at the same time as Kassandra, and which were published separately in German under the title Conditions of a Narrative (Voraussetzungen einer Erzählung). I have not read the essays.